tech

One of the things I find myself doing at work is looking at other peoples code. This is not unusual, of course, as every programmer does that all the time. Even if the ‘other people’ is him, last week. As all you programmers know, rather often ‘other people’s code’ is not very pretty. Partly, this can be explained because every programmer knows, no one is quite as good at programming as himself… But very often, way too often, the code really is not all that good.

This can be caused by many things. Sometimes the programmers are not very experienced. Sometimes the pressure to release new features is such that programmers feel pressured into cutting quality. Sometimes the programmers found the code in that state, and simply didn’t know where to start to improve things. Some programmers may not even have readClean Code, Refactoring, or the Pragmatic Programmer! And maybe no one ever told them they should.

Recently I was asked to look at a Java codebase, to see if it would be possible for our company to take that into a support contract. Or what would be needed to get it to that state. This codebase had a number of problems, with lack of tests, lots of code duplication and a very uneven distribution in complexity (lots of ‘struct’ classes and the logic that should be in them spread out, and duplicated, over the rest). There was plenty wrong, and sonar quickly showed most of them.

When discussing the issues with this particular code base, I noticed that the developers already knew quite a few of the things that were wrong. They did not have a clear idea of how to go from there towards a good state, though. To illustrate how one might approach this, I spent a day making an example out of one of the high complexity classes (cyclomatic complexity of 98).

Larger examples of refactoring are fairly rare out there, so I figured I’d share this. Of course, package and class names (and some constants/variables) have been altered to protect the innocent.

I’d like to emphasize that none of this is very special. I’m not a wizard at doing this, by any standard. I don’t even code full time nowadays. That’s irrelevant: The point here is precisely that by taking a series of very simple and straightforward steps, you can improve your code tremendously. Anyone can do this! Everyone should…

I don’t usually shield off part of my posts under a ‘read-more’ link, but this post had become HUGE, and I don’t want to harm any unsuspecting RSS readers out there. Please, do read the whole thing. And: Let me (and my reader and colleagues) know how this can be done better!